I'm supporting a new campaign to get a system of international Financial Transaction Taxes, called the Robin Hood Tax. The idea's pretty simple. Much of the bank to bank transactions that happen these days are in highly leveraged speculation. This isn't productive - just shuffling money around to make profits for people who can play the system - and it's in many cases actively harmful - Look at what's happened in Greece.

In the UK and many countries, this activity is hardly taxed at all compared to other business activity. So why not tax it? Let's bring in a tiny tax, varying by type of transaction, but between 0.005% and 0.5%. It might sound too small to work, but it would apply to huge volumes of transactions, and really add up.

2 benefits - it would have a dampening effect on the most harmful aspects of speculation, and it would raise mountains of cash at the same time. That's cash that could be used on Millenium Development goals, climate change, health, public services (around $400bn has been mooted as an annual international figure).

There are similar campaigns either currently running, or springing up in many countries around the world. One thing that seems to unite all these disparate groups (in the UK, there are 100 organisations involved for example) is unions. Unions have been quick to see the potential for this tool in reforming the financial system and providing funding we need so badly to repair the damage done by the financial system to the rest of us during the financial crisis, bailout and recession.

And is it really surprising? Governments all over are going to face a stark choice now - they all need much much more cash. Do they cut the public services that ordinary people rely so heavily upon, raise personal taxes, raise business taxes, or institute a Robin Hood Tax? Here's a clue: of those four options, three involve people who weren't to blame for the crisis footing the entire bill (ordinary workers and taxpayers, or the employers they rely upon for jobs), whilst those who were responsible get to keep record profits and bonuses and continue as before.

www.robinhoodtax.org

Some 1,200 members of Mexico's National Miners' and Metalworkers' Union, or Los Mineros, have been on strike since July 2007 at the Cananea mine over health and safety and other contract violations.

Grupo Mexico, the mining giant which operates Cananea, and the Mexican government have continuously tried to end the strike and crush the union.

They have threatened and jailed union leaders, illegally frozen union bank accounts and failed to investigate or prosecute assassinations of union members.

On February 11th, a federal court gave Grupo Mexico permission to fire the striking workers and terminate the labor agreement. The government has threatened to use armed force to gain control of Cananea.

The Los Mineros members at Cananea are resolved to continue occupying the mine until a fair labour agreement is reached. Los Mineros is one of the strongest and most democratic trade unions in Mexico.

Take a moment to send off your letter of protest today from the LabourStart website today by going HERE.

2010 looks to be a big conference year.  LabourStart in July in Hamilton Ontario, Canada, LabourTech in Windsor Ontario, Canada 13-15 May.

The organizing committee has decided to link Labourtech to the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Labour Media to expand our networks and benefit from the workshops offered at both conferences.

    * Conference Schedule <a href="http://www.labourtech.ca/tiki-index.php?page=2010ConferenceSchedule">HERE</a>
    * Deadlines:
          o Conference registration:April 23
          o Hotel rooms:April 14
          o Residence rooms: April 30
    * Cost: $195 or $100 for individuals not funded by an organization or union

To register online go <a href="http://www.labourtech.ca/tiki-index.php?page=2010RegistrationForm">HERE</a>.

People sometimes ask me “John, why should trades unions get involved with Twitter?” No, honest, they really do, my life is *that* exciting at times…

My standard response is that it all depends. The microblogging service Twitter is potentially attractive to unions as it's something of a liberal and Labour ghetto, and it gets a lot of column inches for being flavour of the moment and making people look modern. However, Twitter is almost a platform in search of a utility, and different people/unions might get very different things out of it, or of course nothing at all, depending on how they naturally want to communicate.

Before deciding how you might use Twitter in your union, it's worth thinking a bit about how your members and other people that you want to connect with will be using it themselves. Have a look at the profiles of some key people you’d want to communicate with - who they follow and who follows them. You can see patterns emerge that suggest the way they use Twitter, and how that might link in with you.

Skim-readers

Some people view Twitter as a reading list for whatever’s happening absolutely right this very moment. They follow people or organisations that interest them and when they log in, they see the latest updates - be they from Twitter celebrities, media outlets, or thought leaders in their sphere of interest.

It's not comprehensive - they'll never see more than a fraction of this 24/7 river of information that fits their interests, but that's not the point. They're more interested in the chance to get the very latest news, or tiny insights - updates too small or niche for normal news channels, but in a world of throwaway publishing, still of value to a specialist group.

The new Twitter lists feature has been really valuable to this group. They can split the people they follow into different topics – friends, profession, industry, etc – and follow just the relevant people when they want to be up to date on a particular topic.

Tweets will always be better received if you’re writing them manually, but for skim-readers, there’s also the possibility of automating your tweets, if you’ve something that you regularly produce in a standard format. Press releases might be an example here. Use a tool like Twitterfeed.com to take your website’s RSS feed of press releases (You do have one don’t you? Try open.dapper.net if you don’t), and send new items every hour to your Twitter account. You’ll get less readers than a properly managed feed, but at least some people who want to use Twitter for news alerts and who want your news will be interested in keeping tabs on you this way. If it takes off, then look at investing more time in writing original content for Twitter, but this is a fairly painless way to dip a toe in the water and see what happens.

If you’re publishing for skim-readers, try it out yourself first to see what others are getting out of it. If you’re maintaining a press room on Twitter for example, follow the journalists you’re interested in. If you’re publishing from a blog, follow other bloggers in your area. You’ll get a way of seeing the buzz amongst the people you’re interested in, and at the same time they’ll notice you in their follower lists and might be interested in checking out what you have to say too.

Beware. Being plugged into everything like this is stupidly addictive, and not always good news for nature’s procrastinators like me.

Networkers

Networkers build targeted lists like skim readers, but aim to use them to their professional advantage. They’ll follow people that they already know from their industry or interests, or influential people that they want to communicate with. They’ll use Twitter’s two-way features to follow up on other people’s tweets, making useful connections or contributing their own opinions.

Union officers with a particular specialism might like to work more in this way. An H&S practitioner could connect with other safety bodies, HR and medical sources and safety campaign groups, using retweets (where you forward on someone else’s tweet, with or without comment) to filter out interesting news from the wider community for your own readers.

It’s easy to get noticed if you’re bringing something useful to Twitter for those people who share your interests, and you may make useful new contacts you’d never normally come across, or be able to get useful responses from people who mightn’t answer (or even see) a cold email.

Chatterers

Some people prefer to use Twitter as a sort of time delay version of instant messaging, similar to Facebook status, but in a more extrovert series of interwoven conversations held in public. Chatterers will make much heavier use of replies (typing @ before someone’s username in a tweet draws their attention to it, whilst still keeping it public) and direct messages (DM - similar but hidden from anyone other than the sender and recipient).

Union branches might find this more useful, where the rep is more likely to be plugged in to members’ address books for regular conversation. Twitter gives you the ability to be contacted privately by members with concerns (if you and they already follow each other), or possibly a means for you to quickly solicit feedback on an issue.

It’s always good to make yourself open to members to communicate in the ways in which they’re most comfortable communicating – and for many this is now Twitter. The downside is that people might expect DM responses even more quickly than they’d get from email, and you’d end up putting in a lot of effort for only a smallish group of members who want to communicate that way.

Another issue to bear in mind is that anyone (such as an employer) could see all the people following the union, which some people might be reluctant to reveal, or worse might end up getting people into trouble.

Social searchers

Some people like to use Twitter to find out what the buzz is about a topic at any point, without necessarily building their own lists or followerships. They watch for and follow trending topics (Twitter lists the most popular topics at any one point for different countries) and hashtags (a convention in Twitter where you add a # in front of a word as a way of standardising keywords, so people can more easily find your tweet in searches – eg #trafigura).

Or they might use ‘social search’ engines like Topsy.com to find not the most relevant pages overall for a subject (as a traditional engine would provide) but the most relevant right now. Even the mainstream search engines like Google are moving towards factoring in this kind of social search (see Google's "latest results" box).

A union can make use of this technique by tweeting about topical news they may have, but first searching to see if other people talking about the issue are using a hashtag, and including that too. This will bring extra people to your tweets – only a few, but they’re guaranteed to be interested in the issue you’re talking about, which counts for a lot.

If you’re engaged in a campaign or dispute and will be sending a stream of tweets on it, invent your own hashtag for it. That way you can monitor more easily what others are saying about the issue (if the hashtag spreads), and find potential allies, as well as making sure your own tweets are all front and centre for anyone following the tag.

If you can co-ordinate supporters to all use the same hashtag, you might notice your issue trending, and you’ll get a lot of interest. Try to make clear how people can translate that interest into some kind of action. The flip side to trending of course is that it lasts for hardly any time at all before some celebrity does something funny, or someone invents a new 140 chars meme to spread, and that displaces you from the charts.

Hecklers

Twitter’s wide-open nature makes it an ideal space for people who want to say something publicly. Addressing a message @ someone – be they a union, individual or campaign target – lets everyone else see what was said. If you start an organisational Twitter account, you’ll get people who disapprove of particular decisions/personalities/whatever sending you slightly narky messages that they don’t really want you to respond to – It’s more like a form of cyber-heckling.

Don’t lose sleep about engaging with anything you find offensive – it’s very easy to get wound up about criticism appearing on the web, as it’s there for ever, but in Twitter’s case, people move on after about fifteen minutes. Most people aren’t expecting a reply, they’re just venting, but will be happy to get one. The handy thing about being so restricted in what you can write is that people don’t expect you to reply with volumes. It doesn’t take a long time for any organisation that issues press releases to find a web link to a statement that shows you do care about their issue (or gives an honest reasoning for why you disagree), and whilst it’s unlikely to sway them on the issue, many will appreciate that you at least took the time to respond.

Of course, all this applies to messages you yourself send out to public targets too. You can tie a union’s message to a target’s Twitter account by sending it @ them, but for more popular companies, it will be tomorrow’s chip paper within minutes.

An interesting Twitter application for unions is the Twitter petition – Act.ly has a great tool that lets you petition Twitter users. You write a short demand (actually pretty tricky!) and it sends from your account, tracking a page of people who retweet it. This results in lots of @ messages to the target, making sure they notice it. They have the opportunity to reply, and have that reply appended to the petition on Act.ly. Numbers taking these petitions are low so far, but given the low number of @ messages that most companies will be receiving compared to emails, it may be noticed more than a low volume email action, and has the benefit of every signature bringing a viral effect.

You can reflect on-side heckler activity in other ways too. A Twitterfall is a stream of content published in real time by other users about your issue – it can be a nice web feature to show just how often people are interacting with your ideas. Just make sure you’re not opening yourself up to a spot of griefing. There are Tweet moderating services out there – betas of Tweetriver and Tidytweet are both nice tools – which might sacrifice speed, but will spare your blushes.

Obsessives

And of course there are a large number of people who want to use Twitter for things precisely because they can. The kind of people who will wrestle with an iPhone app for 30 minutes to order a pizza, because it's more fun than ringing up in 2 minutes. These people love Twitter's extensibility, and are the reason there are so many thousands of lovingly coded apps out there that actually do very little other than make you think "that's pretty neat". When you're doing something clever with Twitter - run it past the "pretty neat" test to see if anyone in the real world might use it.

Some parting thoughts. In practical terms, I’d also recommend you use a Twitter client rather than the Twitter website itself. I like Hootsuite.com myself. And of course If you’re posting URLs to Twitter, do so with a URL shortener (otherwise they take a lot out of 140 chars) – ideally one like bit.ly that tracks clickthroughs so you can see if your tweets are being picked up and acted upon, or if you’re just talking to an empty room.

Twitter is low risk. If it doesn’t work out for you, just scrap it. You didn’t pay anything for it or need to drastically alter your comms strategy to make use of it, and most of your followers don’t really expect anything of you – they’re used to new people coming every day, and just as many old people leaving. Experiment with it – there are probably many other types of Twitter users out there amongst your membership or stakeholders, and actually putting a toe in the water may show you for the first time how you could be go about communicating with them.

A new weekly presentation of international labour news is now on the Internet.

The audiocast - called Solidarity News - started on Monday, February 1. The audiocast will remain on the RadioLabour site throughout its current week. New audiocasts will be posted every Monday morning.

RadioLabour is on the Internet at www.radiolabour.org.  It is also on Facebook, please join the RadioLabour page.

RadioLabour is the brainchild of Marc Belanger -- the founder of SoliNet, which was the first trade union online network back in the 1980s.

Solidarity News will focus on union and workers' activities and issues from around the world with special emphasis on emerging market and developing countries.

RadioLabour reporters will provide regular weekly presentations, but a special feature of the audiocast will be reports from unionists who want to report on particular events or publicize an activity of their organization.

Scripts of the audiocasts will be available as aids for unionists who want to learn the use of English as an additional language in the international labour movement.

For more information about RadioLabour, listen to the audiocasts, or provide reports, visit the RadioLabour site.  Or write directly to Marc at m.belanger@radiolabour.org

Received today from Eric Blanc at City College of San Francisco:

To all student, worker, and teacher organizations and activists worldwide:

A California statewide conference of over 800 education faculty, workers, trade unionists, students and community people on October 24, 2009 at the University of California Berkeley issued a call for a Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010 in defense of public education and against cuts, fee hikes, and layoffs.
A key component of this strike and struggle is the fight against the catastrophic privatization of public education system in California. But we know that this attack on education and public workers is a worldwide offensive. Thus there is a need for an international struggle to defend public education and social services and against funding for militarization and war.

We therefore ask organizations of workers, students, and teachers throughout the world to send solidarity statements and organize mobilizations on March 4 in defense of public education. Through international solidarity, we will win!
 
- The California Coordinating Committee
march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com
www.defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com

61 building service workers at the Toronto Dominion Centre in Toronto were locked-out and then fired by their employer when they refused to agree to the gutting of their collective agreement. They were forced to celebrate Christmas on a picket line almost 6 months after being forced off the job. Their union, CEP, is asking you to send a message to Cadillac Fairview, the company that manages the TD Centre. Tell CF that enough is enough! A copy of your message will go to the workers on the picket lines.

30 seconds is all it takes: go HERE to send a message to Caddillac Fairview.

We were expecting some pre-registrations for sure, but in the event the response to a very limited call-out has been overwhelming. Thanks to all who have responded, you're helping us with conference logistics, as well as the agenda.

As of today 382 people from 64 countries have pre-registered.

We know not all who have expressed an interest will be able to come, but it is encouraging to know so many would at least like to.

If you have not yet pre-registered and would like to, go HERE

If you think you might be able to attend the LabourStart conference on 9-11 July 2010 at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, please pre-register. This does not obligate you -- it just gives us a sense of who is interested in attending.

Thanks.

Pre-register HERE.

A group of international union activists is getting together to start a labour audio show on the Internet. The show, which will be  hosted by labour educator Marc Belanger, will feature news about union activities around the globe. The 20 minute audiocast, called Solidarity News, will be presented on www.radiolabour.net every Monday.  

RadioLabour is currently looking for volunteer reporters to provide one or two minute English-language audio reports about union activities in their region of the world. The reporters would be expected to provide their audio-report (as an MP3 file) and a written script of the report.   To volunteer, or find out more about the project, email Marc at:  m.belanger@radiolabour.org